Hi Lewis, this podcast interview, and the match fund is really exciting. I learned many new things in this.
I wonder if you have plans to touch more on fish welfare. And is it possible that you can touch on invertebrate welfare (despite it being out of scope now for OP)?
We discuss two contradictory views about factory farming that produce the same conclusion: that its end is either inevitable or impossible.
Usually when I say anything to you it's about practical stuff, but this time it's going to be pedantic, please excuse me this time.
I think strictly speaking contradictory statements can't be both false (and of course can't be both true). And these two statements can be both false, and I think they are indeed both false (as you pointed out clearly).
I think statements that can't be both true but can be both false are called contrary statements? (I only studied logic in Chinese so I am not sure).
You seem to be assuming that decreasing factory-farming is beneficial, but I think it is harmful if the lives of soil animals have more suffering than happiness. I estimate factory-farming increases the animal-years of wild soil animals much more than it decreases the animal-years of farmed animals. For example, I estimate decreasing the consumption of chicken meat by 0.1 kg results in a reduction of 2.87 chicken-days, but in an increase of 6.16 M soil-animal-years due to decreasing the amount of chicken's feed, and therefore causing some crops to be replaced by biomes with more soil animals. The increase in the animal-years of soil animals is 783 M times the decrease in the animal-years of chickens. This suggests decreasing the consumption of chicken only increases animal welfare if the suffering of chickens is more than 783 M times as intense (as bad per animal-year) as that of soil animals. Nematodes, the most simple soil animal, have 302 neurons, and chickens have 221 M, 732 k (= 221*10^6/302) times as many as nematodes. So the suffering of chickens is 732 k times as intense as that of soil animals if the intensity of suffering is proportional to the number of neurons. If so, decreasing the consumption of chicken would cause 1.07 k (= 783*10^6/(732*10^3)) times as much suffering to soil animals as it averts the suffering of chickens, thus hugely increasing net suffering.
Moreover, I suspect the above underestimates the suffering caused to soil animals relative to the suffering of chickens averted. The expected welfare ranges presented in Table 8.6 of Bob Fischer's book about comparing animal welfare across species are very well explained by "number of neurons"^0.188 (R^2 of 78.6 %). This suggests the suffering of chickens is only 12.7 (= (732*10^3)^0.188) times as intense as that of soil animals. If so, decreasing the consumption of chicken would cause 61.7 M (= 783*10^6/12.7) times as much suffering to soil animals as it averts the suffering of chickens. I personally prefer an exponent of the number of neurons of 0.5, which suggests the suffering of chickens is 856 (= (732*10^3)^0.5) times as intense as that of soil animals. However, this still results in decreasing the consumption of chicken causing 915 k (= 783*10^6/856) times as much suffering to soil animals as it averts the suffering of chickens.
My crucial assumption above that the lives of soil animals have more suffering than happiness is not unusual. Charity Entrepreneurship estimated in 2018 that the lives of wild insects have more suffering than happiness. Moreover, I suspect many people in the animal welfare space think that bringing more lives into existence could be bad even if they have more happiness than suffering. However, I think having more lives with more happiness than suffering is robustly good all else equal, and I can easily see the lives of soil animals having more happiness than suffering (although this is not my best guess). So it would be great to have more research on this question.
If my assumption holds, decreasing the animal-years of soil animals is beneficial, and therefore increasing agricultural land is beneficial too, as it has fewer soil animals than alternative biomes. In this case, replacing plant-based foods with animal-based foods tends to be beneficial due to tendentially increasing agricultural land. However, if soil animals have lives with more happiness than suffering, my conclusion would be reversed, such that replacing animal-based foods with plant-based foods would tend to be beneficial.
Quickly -> I sympathize with these arguments, but I see the above podcast as practically a different topic. Could be a good separate blog post on its own.
Down voted. This podcast is about ending factory farming and I don't think it would make sense to bring in those arguments about smallee creatures - especially on a podcast where messages get to be clear and simple.
Why ending the worst abuses of factory farming is an issue ripe for moral reform
I recently joined Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast to discuss factory farming. I hope you’ll give it a listen — and consider supporting his fundraiser for FarmKind’s Impact Fund. (Dwarkesh is matching all donations up to $250K; use the code “dwarkesh”.)
We discuss two contradictory views about factory farming that produce the same conclusion: that its end is either inevitable or impossible.
Some techno-optimists assume factory farming will vanish in the wake of AGI. Some pessimists see reforming it as a hopeless cause. Both camps arrive at the same conclusion: fatalism. If factory farming is destined to end, or persist, then what’s the point in fighting it?
I think both views are wrong. In fact, I think factory farming sits in the ideal position for moral reform. Because its end is neither inevitable nor impossible, it offers a unique opportunity for advocacy to change the trajectory of human moral progress.
Not inevitable
Dwarkesh raised an objection to working on factory farming that I often hear from techno-optimists who care about the issue: isn’t its end inevitable? Some cite the long arc of moral progress; others the promise of vast technological change like cultivated meat or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which surpasses human capabilities.
It’s true that humanity has achieved incredible moral progress for humans. But that progress was never inevitable — it was the result of moral and political reform as much as technology. And that moral progress mostly hasn’t yet extended to animals. For them, the long moral arc of history has so far only bent downward.
Technology may one day end factory farming, just as cars liberated working horses. Or it may just expand factory farming further, as it has done so far. Dwarkesh and I discuss how the genetic turbocharging of chickens has already produced an animal so efficient that it’s hard to compete with.
Will the arrival of AGI be different? Maybe. Perhaps it cracks cultivated meat or another better way to produce protein. But, as Dwarkesh and I discuss, we’ll still need to persuade people to eat it — and politicians not to ban it.
Thankfully, there’s a lot we can do to lower the probability of factory farming’s abuses persisting forever, and to accelerate progress toward its extinction. (Even ending factory farming a few decades earlier would spare hundreds of billions of animals from lives of suffering.)
Not impossible
Consider advocates’ progress in recent years on three iconic cruelties of factory farming.
Battery cages. The egg industry adopted cages as the cheapest method of production and the pinnacle of efficiency. It had no plans to ever drop them — until advocates won cage-free pledges from major corporations and laws from US states and EU nations. Today the US hen flock is 47% cage-free, while the EU flock is 62% cage-free, and both regions are on a new trajectory to be entirely cage-free.
Broiler chickens. The chicken industry had for a century moved in only one direction: toward crowding ever-fatter birds ever more closely together. Then advocacy groups won chicken welfare reforms from most British, French, German, and Dutch retailers. Last month, French group L214 secured a pledge from the country’s largest chicken producer, LDC Group, to adopt major animal welfare reforms for up to 400 million birds annually.
Chick killing. For decades, the egg industry’s killing of male chicks seemed immune to reform. Then advocates helped kickstart in-ovo sexing technology, which is already in use for 28% of EU hens and just arrived in the US. Today chick killing is on a path to eventual extinction.
Collectively these reforms have already reduced the suffering of over a billion animals. Given they’re permanent, they will reduce the suffering of more than another billion every year, or over 10 billion within a decade. And they’ll further tilt the trajectory away from ever-more cruelty in the world.
Few other social movements can count their impact in how many billion individuals they help.
Operating on a shoestring
Source: CauseIQ database, based on US non-profits’ form 990 financial reporting (mostly from 2023).
The scale of these reforms is all the more remarkable compared with the scale of the movement that achieved them. The entire global movement to fight factory farming — every intervention in every country to help farmed animals and alternative proteins — employs a few thousand full-time advocates and spends less than $300M/year combined. That’s at least an order of magnitude smaller than most comparable movements.
This philanthropic neglect has two silver linings. First, it means that the contribution of each individual matters even more than on most issues. An advocate focused doggedly on an animal welfare reform, or a donor contributing a few hundred thousand dollars, can hope to impact over a million animals’ lives.
Second, it makes me optimistic about what we can achieve as our movement grows. If this is what the pilot version of our movement is capable of, think what the scaled-up version will achieve. And every year our movement is growing.
The opportunity to reduce suffering
I wish the end of factory farming were inevitable. I wish there were an easy path to end all the cruelty it causes. But changing the world is seldom easy — if it were, someone else would have already done it. Factory farming is, after all, a trillion-dollar global industry entrenched deeply in our diets, economy, and politics.
The surprise is not that a few thousand advocates have failed to end this system, but that we’ve achieved so much progress in ending its worst abuses. This progress is all the more remarkable because it was never inevitable. Advocates and funders aren’t just accelerating progress — they’re changing the course of history.
For most of human history, influencing the lives of millions was a luxury reserved for emperors, generals, and prophets — many of whom used that power for ill. Today it’s an opportunity available to most of us. We should seize it.
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Hey Mr. Bollard, thanks so much for yet another informative and inspiring post.
And thanks for your endorsement of Farmkind.
Tbh I wasn't sure how much I should trust it since its a really new org but I'm guessing it's got to be good if you're mentioning it.